USENIX Statement on Environmental Responsibility

USENIX continually seeks ways to lessen its environmental impact on the planet. Below are some of the steps we've taken to date. We always welcome additional suggestions, which you can send via the form on our Contact page.

Conference Venues

  • We do our best to hold our events in environmentally-conscious cities and venues. As much as possible, we contract with hotels and convention centers that have trash and recycling sorting programs.
  • For conference catering needs, we work with hotels to reduce the amount of wasted food as much as possible. In some instances this means ensuring that food left over from conference functions is taken to the hotel employee cafeteria or composted instead of thrown away.

Conference Proceedings

  • We publish conference proceedings in electronic format only and make the files accessible via our website beginning on the first day of the event. Additionally, we only provide training materials electronically via our website.
  • This change has helped reduce our use of paper products and the carbon emissions that come with shipping heavy boxes of proceedings to and from conferences.

Conference Supplies and Giveaways

  • We select the most environmentally-friendly options available for attendee materials such as lanyards and badge holders.
  • Whenever we provide attendee bags, we only source reusable bags made from recycled materials instead of single-use plastic. In general, we do our best to provide usable giveaways that won't end up in landfills immediately following the conference.

Attendee and Member Communications

  • Our on-site signs and conference directories are printed using green materials (biodegradable, recycled, etc.) whenever possible.
  • For our informational contacts with you, we focus on email and social media to minimize our printed and mailed materials. Our goal is to use green materials whenever possible for those materials that we do mail.

Back to USENIX Conference Policies

rev. 02.05.21